Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard ), the fastest RISC-V option ( DC-ROMA II ), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC , which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM. My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of Theseus'. Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end...

Almost a month ago to the day, I wrote about this ritual I have to perform each time I make an appointment with this specific clinic. It went like this: I add a card to their web portal, and set it as my “default” payment method for all new appointments. I make an appointment. I get an email asking me to confirm my payment method, otherwise the appointment is cancelled. I log back into their system, select the “default” card as my payment method, and it works. ...

I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage . The video runs for about half-an-hour. I always enjoy nattering with Kent like this, and Gergely pushed into some worthwhile topics. Given the timing, AI dominated the conversation - we compared it to earlier technology shifts, the experience of agile methods, the role of TDD, the danger of unhealthy performance metrics, and how to thrive in an AI-native in...

The other day, as I was driving home, I had the bad idea of listening to the most recent Waveform podcast , where they were discussing vertical vs horizontal tabs in browsers (and many other things). The whole discussion was truly painful to listen to, you’d hope people who talk tech for a living have some more elaborate takes on this kind of stuff, and yet, the whole discussion was very, very dumb. I am not going to discuss the merits of vertical vs horizontal tabs, but I am going to say t...

Weaver, seen from the Front , Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design can roughly be designed as the contract between the creator and the user, where the contract is designed by a set of affordances, or actions that the product allows the user to take. This is all cribbed from Don Norman and The Beauty of Everyday Things . For...

Antarctic snow cruiser circa 1939, via Historyland . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at whether the Strait of Hormuz is open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced earl...

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often comes from people without a meaningful amount of direct experience with them. They are not necessaril...

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client 2026-04-09 18:30 I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the same wall: the clients are heavy. Mastodon's web interface ships megabytes of JavaScript. Elk, ...

My best friend lost his Dad yesterday. Understandably he's extremely upset, and I feel awful for him. I never know what to do in these situations - "how are you doing?" just feels such a stupid thing to say. Like it's nowhere near enough. Of course he isn't doing well, you fucking idiot! His loss has brought about feelings of loss following the death of my own Dad. Who we lost back in 2008 to cancer, when he was 47. Watching him just wither away was heartbreaking. Especially at the age of 23...

I’ve been messing around with local LLMs on my 3090 for a while now — I have a growing collection of Qwen models on D:\LLM that I probably should be embarrassed about. A few weeks ago I stumbled across David Noel Ng’s LLM Neuroanatomy blog posts, where he showed that you can take a pretrained transformer and literally just re-run some of its middle layers a second time at inference, no retraining needed, and get meaningfully better outputs. The D:\LLM folder. I should probably ...

Guest post from Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory director (though not affiliated with the NSF now) on the White House NSF budget for FY 2027. --------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues A week ago the White House released the NSF budget request for FY 2027(  here ) so I want to provide you an update. As always, this is just my interpretation, I am not connected to the NSF any more The general news is bad, we get a replay of FY 2026 (FY 2026 is October 2025 to September 2026) For...

Tucked in a tiny timed capsule against its wonky, worldly windows mesmerized the momentary Moonfarers at sweeping sights of Selene Creased by craters and crowning peaks melts and mountains molded in weeks amid barrages of ballistically laid beads lingered the landscape of Luna What the world could view is impact not as distant through the capsule crew For a world bent and battered showed that it wasn’t shattered that it was weathered, not withered trembled, not tamed or tattered Just like the ...

A Acemoglu2023 Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity . PublicAffairs, 2023, 978-1541702530. Achen2017 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government . Princeton University Press, 2017, 978-1400888740. Adams1905 Samuel Hopkins Adams: The Great American Fraud . Collier, 1906. B Baldwin2014 Peter Baldwin: The Copyright Wars: Three Cen...

inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

“Gandalf, my old friend, this will be a night to remember.” ― The Lord of the Rings The next three days of my journey, I've spent in and around Twizel. This region is called the Mackenzie Basin, which includes a few popular tourist spots. It's also where my friends from Germany now live, and I was excited to see them again after a long time! On my way to Twizel, I've made a few stops. First, I've checked out the Moeraki Boulders . Fortunately, it was only a short detour, as I ...

Initially, we had languages like Fortran (1957), Pascal (1970), and C (1972). Fortran was designed for number crunching and scientific computing. Pascal was restrictive with respect to low-level access (it was deliberately “safe”, as meant for teaching structured programming). So C won out as a language that allowed low-level/unsafe programming (pointer arithmetic, direct memory access) while remaining general-purpose enough for systems work like Unix. To be fair, Pascal had descendants that...

WASHINGTON – (March 30, 2026) – Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, in partnership with Shield AI, L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), and Parry Labs, completed its fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 Airbus helicopter and successfully integrated all four company’s technologies into a single aircraft together for the first time. The test flights, which took place at the Airbus facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, focused on refining the aircraft’s perception system to ensure it provi...

Gimkit is a quiz game originally built by a high school student where players enter a map as animated characters, answer questions to earn virtual currency, and spend it on upgrades between rounds. The default format puts every player against each other, but Gimkit groups change that. When team mode is on, participants split into squads that pool earnings and compete together. How Gimkit Groups Work During a Live Session Students join at gimkit.com/live using a room code, then pick a charact...

We talk here sometimes about how to test SQL dialects with tools like TLP and PQS . One really nice property of those tools is that they let you treat the database like a blackbox. I'm tinkering with a little SQL planner to mess around with ideas and one feature I added very early was an explicit optimization fence operator that simply blocks any optimizations: In a query like this: SELECT * FROM ( SELECT a , b , c , d FROM foo , bar WHERE a = c ) WHERE b...

Why we need collaborative AI engineering Why we need collaborative AI engineering

Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses. Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses.

Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs. You could say that we still make extensive use of light for communications today, in the form of fiber optics. Early on, some fiber users (such as AT&T) even preferred the term "lightguide," a nice analogy to the long-distance waveguides that Bell Laboratories had experimented with. The ...

As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then sit comfortably on the couch and control the session from the inside. Which means I can do much lon...